Making the Connections: Crafting, Circuitry, and Coding in High School E-Textile Workshops

• In Event: Textile Messages: Dispatches From the World of E-Textiles and Education

Abstract

1. Objective
Most technology designs make invisible what makes them work. Yet for educational purposes, visibility is more beneficial for promoting understanding. When using e-textiles, the fabrication of stitches, circuits and codes reveals the underlying structures and processes in tangible ways. While learning how to sew, how to make functional circuits, and how to write code that activates control sensors are each valuable practices in their own right; learning how to see the connections between these parts is what makes designing with e-textiles greater than its individual parts. This presentation explores the constraints and openness of e-textile design and the extent to which young designers think about the interdependencies of individual parts in making a larger functional system when designing with e-textiles.

2. Perspectives
E-textiles move learning about and with technology beyond the screen into the realm of digital media, where media scholars like Henry Jenkins have long called for “transparency” of technologies to foster critical thinking. While design practices are popular with youth for manipulating and producing graphics, video, and music, few have ventured into the physical domain. It is precisely these intersections between crafting, circuitry, and coding that are at the heart of this presentation.

3. Data sources
Data was drawn from e-textile workshops for high school students, which took place over four to six days, meeting two hours at a time, with youth ages 13-14 years old. Workshops were videotaped and later transcribed. We performed discourse analysis on the discussions that took place at the various intersections between crafting, coding and circuitry as well at the combination of all three domains, debugging.

4. Findings
The intersection of these domains provided challenges for many youth, and youth appeared to learn most through debugging their own projects. A sense of ownership helped them to persevere through solving the most difficult of these challenges. In the time-constraints of a workshop setting youth can tackle some simple LilyPad Arduino projects. In order to create e-textiles projects of greater complexity, youth need to develop a better understanding of how different components function and how to incorporate them into their designs. For instance, in a workshop we ran where about half of the students had already participated in another e-textiles workshop, we encouraged students to go beyond simple circuits by incorporating additional input devices. While students seemed to enjoy this activity, when it came to their own projects, most did not incorporate a sensor. This suggests that students need more time to assimilate the different kinds of knowledge needed to complete an e-textiles project, both scaffolding from one level to another within a domain as well as transferring knowledge across domains.

5. Significance
The multiple components that make up e-textiles render visible how technology is designed and built, making technology more transparent to groups operating at the margins of STEM disciplines.

Authors

• Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

• Deborah A. Fields, Utah State University

• Kristin Anne Searle, University of Pennsylvania